Ars has reviewed GNOME 3.0, and concludes: "The solid technical work that has been done under the hood really complements the new user experience features in GNOME 3.0. Despite some of the gaps in the feature set, I think that the environment and the new shell is a good starting point for building something even better. The GNOME contributors will be able to iterate on the design and move it forward in future updates."

Very few, considering most users won't be using vanilla Gnome 3. The distros will be modifying it as they integrate it into their offerings and many if not most will be adding functionality back into their default setups as they see fit.